MINNEAPOLIS – The NFL's Thursday Night Football broadcasts are moving to Fox.

The league and the network announced Wednesday that they have agreed to a five-year deal that will keep the NFL's Thursday night games on Fox through 2022. Fox will pay more than $3 billion over the length of the deal (in excess of $600 million per year), a person with knowledge of the details told USA TODAY Sports. The person was granted anonymity because financial terms were not made public.

"We had a tremendous amount of interest from all of the broadcast partners, all of which wanted the rights exclusively," NFL commissioner Roger Goodell told reporters on a conference call. "They were willing to not split the package, and we felt that this was the best opportunity for the NFL to continue to grow the Thursday Night package."

The deal includes 11 games per season from Week 4 through Week 15, with the exception of Thanksgiving night. All 11 games will also be simultaneously broadcast on NFL Network, which will exclusively televise seven games in 2018.

"These opportunities come along very infrequently," said Peter Rice, president of 21st Century Fox. "You either have the rights to the most-watched content in media or you don’t. If you lose that auction and you don’t take that opportunity to expand this partnership, this won’t come up again for another five years, so we are doing it to strengthen Fox broadcasting."

Fox was one of several major networks to submit a bid for Thursday Night Football rights. CBS and NBC, who paid $900 million combined over the previous two-year deal, also submitted bids.

“We explored a responsible bid for Thursday Night Football but in the end are very pleased to return to entertainment programming on television’s biggest night," CBS said in a statement to USA TODAY Sports.

Goodell said the Fox deal will still allow the NFL to shop the digital rights for the Thursday package. The games were streamed on Twitter in 2016 and Amazon in 2017.

"We will continue to have the digital rights, which we will explore and deal with in the next several weeks in partnership with Fox," Goodell said.